Tai Chi Chuan is globally recognized as the foremost martial arts style, epitomizing the quintessence of Chinese martial arts. It ranks among the three major internal schools of martial arts in China—Tai Chi Chuan, Xing Yi Quan, and Bagua Zhang. As a vessel and emblem of traditional Chinese culture, Tai Chi Chuan manifests and interprets the wisdom of traditional Chinese philosophy through the physical form.
Ancient Tai Chi manuals clearly state that all movements in Tai Chi are formed in response to the opponent's actions, thus lacking the fancy, bizarre, and complex proactive skills found in some external martial arts. In this sense, Tai Chi is actually simple and easy to learn. However, even the simplest actions can be challenging. For example, who can't walk? Everyone thinks walking is simple, but tightrope walking is essentially walking. How many people in the world can walk on a tightrope hundreds of meters high above a canyon? Hence, walking also involves difficulty and tricks. Indeed, no matter how clear and straightforward the principles and techniques of any skill in the world, learning it involves difficulty and tricks; mastering any skill to a high level is even more challenging. Learning Tai Chi is naturally difficult and requires tricks, and for the average person, the difficulty can be quite substantial, even insurmountable for some, hence the saying, "Many practice, but few succeed." Can this situation be changed? Of course.
The basic principles of traditional Tai Chi are simple to say but difficult to put into the body: calm the mind, remove unnecessary tension, distinguish empty from full, keep the body connected, let the feet and legs support the movement, use the waist to direct it, and allow the hands to express what the whole body is doing. After practicing Tai Chi and other Chinese martial arts for more than forty years, I have become less interested in how beautifully someone can repeat these principles and much more interested in whether they can actually show them when they move. The current ChenStyle author biography records more than four decades of hands-on martial arts experience, including training, competition, judging and exchanges with senior practitioners. Many of these ideas appear in what we now call the Tai Chi Classics, especially the writings associated with Wu Yuxiang (武禹襄) and the Wu-Li tradition. The old texts are short. Sometimes a single sentence contains enough material to keep a serious student busy for years. That is one reason I think reading them as a list of inspirational quotations misses their real value. They were meant to guide practice.
Part 1: "Inherent distinct method: At the beginning of life, one's eyes can see, ears can hear, nose can smell, mouth can taste; colors, sounds, fragrances, and tastes—all are natural perceptions, inherent goodness. The movements of hands and feet, the abilities of the four limbs—all are natural and inherent. When considering this, people become familiar without cause; human nature is close but also distant, lost and confused in the inherent. To restore our inherent, we must seek the root of movement through martial practice and the original source of perception through scholarly understanding. It is by moving that we perceive, and by perceiving that we feel. Without movement, there is no perception; without action, there is no sensation. When movement reaches its extreme, it becomes action; when perception is heightened, it becomes knowledge. The one who knows through action…